Saturday, October 26, 2013

This article appeared in the August 2011 of Digital Journal. Today, as Saudi women are claiming the roads in a pre-organized protest, here are my somber thoughts:

By Talia Carner

Earlier this year, the world
watched with bated breath as Egyptian women took to the streets alongside men
to protest Mubarak’s rule and demand democracy. Cynically, men encouraged
women’s participation—only to betray them once Mubarak was removed. Merely a
few months later, Egypt—formerly the more modern among Muslim nations—has
regressed into gender apartheid the like of which the country has not been seen
in decades, and “modesty squads” roam neighborhoods in search of errant women
whose appearance or behavior defy the Extreme Islam’s dictates.Does anyone believe that Saudi
women will fare better in their quest for the right to drive? In 2010, the Global
Gender Gap Report ranked Saudi Arabia 129th out of 134 countries for gender
parity (down from spot #114 in 2006.) Islamic patriarchal system has
kept Saudi women not just from driving, but from traveling, working and even
signing medical forms without the permission of a male guardian—any male relative,
even their own minor child. Gender apartheid is the basis for the entire
Muslim social structure. The Arabic word “fitna”
means both civil disorder and beautiful woman. In his 2004 article, “Female
Desire and Islamic Trauma,” Islam scholar Daniel Pipes explains:“The entire Muslim social
structure… goes to great lengths to separate the sexes and reduce contact
between them. This explains such customs as the covering of women's faces and
the separation of women's residential quarters, or the harem. Many other
institutions serve to reduce female power over men, such as her need for a
male's permission to travel, work, marry, or divorce. Revealingly, a
traditional Muslim wedding took place between two men – the groom and the
bride's guardian.” The reason, Dr. Pipes explains, is rooted by the view that a
woman’s sexual desire is so great, that believers are obsessed with the dangers
posed by her presence. “So strong are her [sexual] needs …she represents the
forces of unreason and disorder. …She must be contained, for her unbridled
sexuality poses a direct danger to the social order.”For that reason, in 2002, in Saudi Arabia,
religious policemen prevented fourteen-year-old schoolgirls from leaving a
burning school building because they were not wearing their headscarves and abayahs. Fifteen girls died.The Quran was written long
before automobiles were invented. Therefore, it did not specifically prohibit
women from driving. It did not even forbid women from riding horses or
camels.And in a society obsessed with the
modesty of women’s dress, cars actually hide women better than any other
methods of transportation. Saudi Arabia’s leaders’ explanation that women
driving is unsafe and leads to sexual impropriety is entirely false, as women
are routinely pinched and groped through the chadors when walking in the streets, and are often sexually
harassed by taxi drivers—or even raped by their own chauffeurs. On the other hand, driving
women around has created a source of income for many Saudi men: there are
hundreds of thousands of chauffeurs in Saudi Arabia. Removing the
religious fatwa against women driving
would deeply affect an entire profession.Phyllis Chesler has written
extensively that subjugating women is behind the brutal misogynistic Islamic
practices such as female genital mutilation, stoning and immolation of women,
beatings, forced marriages, child marriages and polygamy.Now that Muslim feminists are taking to the
streets in protest for the right to drive, they are beaten by mobs, yet have no
legal protection even in cases of barbaric assault or rape. Zuhdi Jasser,
president of the American Islamic Forum for Democracy, commented at FoxNews.com
"… [Saudi] women's rights activists
have very little [legal] protection for their physical well-being …This is the
problem in a corrupt society…. Republics of fear oppress and repress their
citizens by allowing criminals to do the dirty work of the government. It
allows the government to keep [its] hands free." Saudi Arabia is the only country that prohibits women
from driving. But viewing the protesting women in context of the men’s dread of
female power to cause civil disorder, it is clear that breaking any taboo
carries the unthinkable threat of women seeking rights for representation
in government, in marriage and divorce, or in property ownership. In the midst of the Arab
awakening, women fighting oppression—in Saudi or any other Muslim nation—is
doomed to fade away into a dark night, because the power to relinquish control
lies in the hands of their oppressors: men, government, and Islamic religious
leadership.

About Me

Talia Carner is formerly the publisher of Savvy Woman magazine and a lecturer at international women’s economic forums. The award-winning author of heart-wrenching suspense novels will soon welcome her new novel, HOTEL MOSCOW, (summer 2015, HarperCollins,) that will follow her previous successful novels, JERUSALEM MAIDEN, CHINA DOLL and PUPPET CHILD, all hailed for exposing society’s ills.